March 29, 2016 (A336, PE9). The current SNF Editor-in-Chief, Alex I. Braginski, steps down from that IEEE & ESAS volunteer position, effective March 31st, 2016. He served from the SNF inception in 2006/2007 until present, and resigns due to age and health issues. Nevertheless, in the 2nd quarter of 2016, he agreed to serve as Acting Editor until the newly appointed next Editor-in-Chief, Horst Rogalla, gradually takes over all current SNF activities. Also, for the time being, Alex will remain SNF Co-Editor Electronics, until a successor is found, or at least until the end of 2016.

ESAS Board Election Results

September 16, 2015 (PE8). During the EUCAS 2015 meeting in Lyon, France, the following people were elected (or re-elected) to six year terms on the ESAS Board finishing in 2021.

March 17, 2015 (PE7). The leader of the Bulk Superconductivity Group at the University of Cambridge, Prof. David Cardwell, has, this year, taken up a five year appointment as Head of Department. The Engineering Department has published an interview with Dr John Durrell, recently appointed faculty member, who will be looking after the group during this period. In the interview Dr Durrell outlines the strategy for the group in the near term and prospects for practical applications of Bulk Superconductors.

by John Durrell

Antonio della Corte, New President of IEEE CSC

January 16, 2015 (PE6). Antonio della Corte, Head of the Superconductivity Laboratory, ENEA - Frascati Research Center in Rome, Italy, became President, IEEE Council on Superconductivity (CSC), effective January 1, 2015. The office term is two years, renewable for another two. Until the end of 2014 he was CSC President Elect. Antonio is also President of the Italian Consortium for Applied Superconductivity (ICAS). Upon taking the office, he issued a message to CSC Affiliates and the Superconductivity Community, see http://ieeecsc.org/pages/message-president.

Antonio della Corte

FLUXONICS e.V. Elects New Board

February 25, 2014 (PE5). The annual meeting of FLUXONICS e.V., the European Foundry for Superconductive Electronics, was held on 18 September 2013 in Genoa, Italy, to coincide with EUCAS 2013. At this meeting, the members elected a new Board for the next three-year term.

Pascal Febvre (Savoie University) was elected as Chairman, with Natascia De Leo (Instituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica - INRIM) and Hannes Toepfer (Ilmenau University of Technology) elected as Deputy Chairmen.

The members also elected Denis Crété (Thales) and Jürgen Kunert (IPHT) as members for the Industry and Research Advisory Board.

Cathy Foley is New Editor-in-Chief of SuST

February 24, 2014 (PE4). Cathy Foley of Australian CSIRO (www.csiro.au) accepted the invitation to become new Editor-in-Chief of the journal Superconductor Science and Technology (SuST) published by the (British) Institute of Physics (IOP). She replaces Damian Hampshire, who for seven fruitful years held the editorial ruder of SuST. Under his tenure, SuST became the journal on superconductivity having the highest impact factor of all such periodical publications worldwide. We wish Cathy best of success in her new role!

Kent Irwin of NIST-Boulder Appointed Full Professor at Stanford University

January 2, 2014 (PE3). In 2013, Dr. Kent D. Irwin of NIST-Boulder was appointed Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics and of Photon Science at the Stanford University, Department of Physics. This is a joint appointment with Particle Physics and Astrophysics and Photon Science Departments of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. At NIST, his research focussed on experiments to probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, gravity at large scales, the mass and number of neutrino species, the characteristics of inflation and the cosmic gravity wave background, and the evolution of structure and disposition of baryonic matter in the universe. For more information see : https://physics.stanford.edu/people/faculty/kent-irwin.

Kent’s major contribution to Applied Superconductivity has been the pioneering work on developing detectors and detector readout circuits , such as SQUID multliplexers and amplifiers, leading eventually to first detector array cameras of radio-astronomical telescopes, credited already by multiple new discoveries.

Kent Irwin

New ESAS Board members.
(See the update below)

October 11, 2011 (PE2). During the Superconductivity Centennial Conference held in The Hague, The Netherlands, September 17 to 23, 2011, the ESAS General Meeting (held on September 22nd) elected new ESAS Board members.

Generally, the ESAS Board is composed of:

Members appointed by the General Meeting

Two members from the ASC Board, nominated by the ASC Board

Up to two members from Asia, invited by the ESAS Board

Up to two members from CONECTUS, nominated by CONECTUS

One member representing the IEEE Council on Superconductivity (CSC)

The chairmen of the previous and next EUCAS conference

The following members retired from the Board and deserve thanks for their dedicated service:

Ludwig Schultz (Chair of EUCAS'09)

Andrea Gauzzi

Tatiana Prikhna

Sergio Zannella.

Furthermore, Osami Tsukamoto (Asia/Japan representative) proposed to be replaced by Hiroyuki Ohsaki, who accepted this responsibility.

The new or continuing officers of ESAS are:

Matthias Noe - President

David Cardwell - Treasurer

Bernhard Holzapfel - Secretary.

They deserve thanks for accepting these responsibilities and their willingness to serve the European superconductivity community. The past President, Xavier Obradors and the past secretary, Pascal Tixador deserve special thanks for their past service.

We provide short resumes of the newly elected or re-elected members of the Board and congratulate them on their election. We also provide the full roster of the current ESAS Board members including their functions and institutional affiliations.

January 2, 2014 (PE2 Update). Terms of all three ESAS Officers continue until EUCAS 2015. See their bios and photos.

January 25, 2011 (PE1). The Administrative Committee (AdCom) of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity (CSC) elected at their meeting on July 31st, 2010, the new President and Vice-President (President-Elect) for a two-year renewable term starting on January 1st, 2011. Among other duties, the President of CSC represents the Council at the three annual meetings of IEEE TAB (Technical Activities Board) and has TAB voting rights. The past President, who served two terms, is John Spargo of Northrop-Grumman Corporation (NGC) in Redondo Beach, CA, USA. We (ESNF) certainly express the sentiment of all CSC AdCom members, and of many superconductivity community members at large, by thanking John for his dedicated service to the community. Under John’s leadership the CSC continued its solid growth through support of conferences (ASC, MT, and many smaller topical conferences in the field), and recognition of significant accomplishments, including lifetime contributions, through the IEEE CSC awards. Also during John’s tenure, the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity became a bi-monthly rather than quarterly publication maintaining a rather high impact factor, the ENSF was launched, and an IEEE-CSC graduate student grants program was initiated.

The newly elected officers are: Elie K. Track as President and Antonio della Corte as President-Elect. Their short biographies follow below. We expect to be able to publish in the near future the Address of the new President, in which he may present his plans and projections for CSC activities in 2011-2012.

January 2, 2014 (PE1 Update). In 2012, Elie Track and Antonio della Corte were re-conducted in their offices for the term ending December 31, 2014.

Elie K. Track

Elie K. Track was born in Beirut Lebanon and graduated in 1979 from the American University of Beirut with a B.S. in Physics. After two years of teaching at the International College in Beirut, he continued his studies at Yale University, earning his PhD in Physics in 1988. He then joined HYPRES as a Member of the Technical Staff, evolving in various roles which included President and CEO from 1994 to 2000. During that time he focused the company’s R&D effort applications-relevant developments in electronics including instrumentation – Primary Voltage Standards – and communications – A/D converters and their applications in wireless technologies. He was Visiting Professor at Fairfield University from 2003 to 2005. He is currently Sr. Partner at HYPRES with diverse roles including innovative applications as well as coordination with the cryogenics community. Elie authored and co-authored more than 44 publications in applied superconductivity. He has served on the Applied Superconductivity Conference Board from 1994 to 2000, and from 2004 until the present, including Electronics Program Chair in 1998 and 2006, Nominations Chair in 2010, and future Conference Chair for ASC 2014.

Elie K. Track

Since 1999, he has served on the Board of the Yale Science and Engineering Association, including as President from 2007 to 2010. He was Chair of CCAS – the (US) Coalition for the Commercial Applications of Superconductors from 2008 to 2010. After serving as Vice-President (President-Elect) of the IEEE-CSC from 2006 to 2010, he was elected by the AdCom, in August 2010, as President beginning his term on January 1, 2011.

Antonio della Corte

Antonio della Corte was born in Bolzano Italy and graduated in 1982 with a major in mechanical engineering. In the same year, he received the Italian Engineering Licence. After his first job as Construction Site Manager for an important Italian company active in the construction of large civil structures, he has been employed (since 1986) in ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development; initially as researcher dealing with stress analysis in superconducting conductors and coils. In those years he developed expertise in cryogenics and in applied superconductivity. At ENEA he held responsible roles at an international level, becoming one of the foremost experts in the design and manufacture of superconducting conductors and coils, in particular for magnets for plasma confinement in reactors for nuclear fusion. Since 2003 he is Head of the Superconductivity Division of the Fusion and Nuclear Presidium Unit at ENEA, leading a staff of about 30 people, 20 professionals and 10 technicians.

Antonio della Corte

Since September 2010 he is also President of the new company ICAS (Italian Consortium on Applied Superconductivity), which will be manufacturing conductors for superconducting magnets of the nuclear fusion reactor ITER, under construction in France.

Antonio is the author and co-author of more than 80 scientific articles, most of which in international professional journals, collaborating also as expert referee in the selection of papers for publication and chairing many sessions at international conferences devoted to fusion and superconductivity. At the IEEE-CSC AdCom meeting of 2010, he was elected as Vice-President (President-Elect) beginning his term on January 1, 2011. Also, during the last ASC 2010 in Washington, DC, he has been elected to the ASC Board of Directors for Large Scale Applications.